What You Need:

What You Do:

Have your child brainstorm ideas for a sentence that has words that he thinks he can include in a poem. For example, he may come up with a sentence of “I love to write poetry.”

Next he will write a poem where each line of the poem contains some of the words in the “I love to write poetry” sentence. For example, one line of the poem may have “I,” the next line “love,” and so on. Two words from the sentence can appear in the same line, but the sentence words should appear in the poem in the same order in which they appear in the sentence.

Have your child pick a colored pencil to make the “secret sentence” words a different color within the poem. He can trace over the “secret sentence” words in that different color, for example with a green colored pencil.

Your child can use the other colored pencils to draw a picture to accompany the poem.

Finally, have him read the poem aloud, always an important part of the poetry process!

If he enjoyed writing this “secret sentence” poem, let him come up with more sentence ideas and write some more poems. You can even use it to write secret messages within a short story or a paragraph.